Easter Sunday

Surprisingly, I had a great Easter Sunday, even though the first half of my break had been somewhat miserable, since all my friends had either left or were on silent retreat, so pretty much all I had to do was play computer games, which is fun at first but gets boring after a few days. You know you're bored when you start cleaning your room to the point that you organize your pens in the drawer by color. (ok, so I never got quite that desperate)
Anyways, Easter Vigil Mass was beautiful, and they did all 8 of the Old Testament readings, which Father said in his homily gave us some small idea of how long the Israelites were waiting. There weren't any baptisms or confirmations, but once again, there were alot of tutor families there, so it was quite crowded. After Mass, we had what they called a "brunch" but as someone (I can't remember who) pointed out, it was almost the farthest you could get from a brunch, since it was at 2 am. Anyways, it was quite delicious, and afterwards we cleared out the tables and danced almost till dawn.
Right before dawn alot of the students headed up to the painter's shack, where we watched the sunrise and sang Easter hymns.
Sahsa, a future freshman whom I met through Joe, had very kindly invited me over to her house at the dance, since I had nowhere else to go for Easter dinner, and Johnathan Teichert drove me over there at about 1.
I was somewhat surprised that I was the only one there bseides Sahsa, her sister Stephanie, and Mr. and Mrs. Bunjak (at least fro several hours), but we had a great time. Sahs'a parents were quite interesting, I talked wih them both about the Terri Schaivo case at lenght, and with Mr. Bunjak for severalhours about his Slovak ancestry, and the Byzantine Easter Traditions of the Byzantine Rite history in general, and also viewed his stamp collection.
Then we had Easter dinner at about 4:30 which consisted of some excellent German sausages, Slovakian ham, a beet-horseradish sauce made by Mr. Bunjak, and some easter cupcakes for dessert. (apparently the Teichert's had borrowed their Lamb Cake mold, so they decided to have cupcakes instead)
The Bunjak's friends, the Embreys, arrived a couple hours late at about 5, and we played a very fun game, where Mrs. Bunjak hid 14 common items, like a fork, a toothpick, a paperclip, and such stuff in their living room in plain sight, and then we were told what items were hidden, and atemped to find them. It sounds quite simple, but the items were disguised in such a way that you would not think notice them at all on first glance, even though you know what you were looking for, and when you finally realized it, you could almost smash your head against a wall for not seeing it any of the previous 5 times you looked at it. it took us 40 minutes to an hour to find them all (since we were all on different teams, and you didn't pick up the item when you found it, but just marked it off your list so the other people could find it).
After that, we talked for awhile more about the Terri Schaivo case (which I am getting somewhat tired of hearing about, I talked about it with my mom for about an hour on monday, and just got an email from her with 10 links to articles about it, which I am diligently plowing through like the obedient son I am, after which I don't think I want to hear about it again till it's over and done with.), and then viewed the Bunjak's slides from their several trips to the Holy Land. To be honest, I only remember a few of them, because I was falling asleep at the time scratching the head of their dog, Bailey, since I had gotten about 9 hours of sleep in the past 4 days.
The Embrey's left at about 9, and after discussing the Schaivo case again for another half hour the Bunjaks were going to go to bed, so Sasha drove me over the the Teicherts', who had had a huge party that evening with something like 55 students at their house, which is more students then were on campus over break I think (since many students who were at home, but in the immediate area came to their party).
While there, we watched "The Incredibles," which is a great movie by Pixar, hilarious, and filled with good family morals. We watched some of the extra features afterwards, and one, called "Jack-Jack Attack," was particularly hilarious. I drove back to campus in the suburban driven by Henry Teichert, and all of us in the car were given a demonstration of the powerful engine, superb traction, and speedy driving skills on Henry, who got us back to campus 4 minutes before curfew.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Triduum

We had a beautiful week of services here, even though we don't have our chapel yet. The Holy Thursday Mass was beautiful, and surprisingly crowded, since there aren't many students on campus, but many tutors were there with their familes.
The Good Friday service was somewhat similar to what I'm used to, but they did a few things differently, and they did the stations of the cross in the evening instead of in the afternoon.
They had three or four showings on the passion this week, and I saw it on Friday night. Although I had to run back to my room to get my roommate's DVD, because apparently he has one of the only widescreen editions on campus, and Henry Theichert, being awesome, knew that widescreen is the best.

Dreams During Math Class...Kindof

Yeah...I didn't fall asleep in Math class today.
No, seriously!
I just had a dream with my eyes open.
I was staring at Deirdre doing prop 97 of Book X, which I hadn't bothered to study because it wasn't important and she was assigned it and I hate Book X. Anyway, I was staring at her doing this prop, and completely zoning out my mind, and a few minutes later we're actually having an interesting discussion in class, and for some reason Kitty brought Mary's snake, Felix, out of her pocket (which, by the way, is a very cool pet), and was relating it to the discussion somehow, and then Mr. Wodzinski was playing with the snake and leadint the discussion at the same time. It was great fun!
Then I turned my head away from Mr. Wodzinski and back to the board, and there was Deirdre droning on about lines conmesurable and irrational and junk.
Yeah...so there was no snake in class, only in my head. Bummer.

Pride and Prejudice

Last night we watched the second half of Pride and Prejudice, which made sense, seeing as we watched part I the night before. It was a very good movie actually, muc better than I expected, although there weren't many surprises, since I had read the book (which I reccomend as well) and rememebered things as it went along.
Brittany was there too, she's Mary's and Mose's friend from back home, and is really cool and fun. She and Jen, as the only single girls there, felt obliged to make the rest of us knowledgeable about their undying love for Mr. Darcy. (I have since learned that almost all girls have a crush on him, or at least like him a lot, even if they are taken. Case in point: Mary dreamed last night that Pete was Mr. Darcy.)
After that we went down and canced, and David and I taught Brittany how to dance, even though she didn't want to. She ended up liking it by the end though, so we'll probably dance more tonight. It's quite fun dancing with girls who don't know how to dance, because it's quite a challenge to lead them properly. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to dance with a girl who knows what you're going to do as soon as you do, but it's not very hard, I usually don't even have to think about what I'm doing anymore, which deos make it much easier to hold a conversation or plan some really tricky moves. Anyway, she was flipped to, and decided that was fun as well.
And I didn't drop her. Go me.

Bleah...and stuff.

I might explain the "bleah" later, but for now, here's a couple posts about last Sunday.

Latin Quenya Paper

I had a Latin paper due last Sunday at Curfew. (11pm)
Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) I had a bout of temporary insanity at about 3pm, when I decided to scrap my nice, normal, boring paper, and delete it.
With the question being "Is the Ablative Case only one or more than one case, and how is it divided or not?" The majority of people in our class wrote that it was one case. Maybe a third wrote that is was two cases, severl that it was three cases, and a few people that it was six cases.
However, I can safely say that I'm the only person in my entire class that wrote that the ablative was actually SEVEN cases, and then proceeded to use Quenya (a form of Tolkkien's Elvish) to prove it.
I have absolutely no clue what grade i'm going to get on that Paper, but it was the funnest I've ever written. :D

Chapel Plans for TAC

Also on Sunday, I had dinner over at Father Borden's with the rest of the altarboys. Mr. and Mrs. Dillon (The president and his wife) were there, and as I sat at the dinner table next to them, we talked for quite a bit.
The interesting part (besides how they were recovering from the flooding down in the hacienda) was the construction plans for the chapel. I found out that they hope to start working in June, and they're almost positive they will be able to start work before the end of summer. The plans project that the building will take two and a half years, but Mr. Dillon hoped to get it done in two. I'm guessing three.
As a side note, though the chapel will be beautiful, it won't have any stained glass windows to start with, because they're going to get the money for those later, but they think it's important to get the chapel up now.
Also, they might start building the official faculty office building while the chapel is building, because that should only take a year to build. And once that's done, it's time to blow up St. Patrick's Hall!!! YAHOO!!! No more eyesore in the middle of the green!
(is it wrong to post about celebrating the destruction of St. Paddy's Hall on his feastday?)
Anyway, it sounds like it's still possible that the chapel might be finished before we graduate, which would be awesome.

Architectural sketches of the chapel:







Chapel Website

bleah.

Unle Bob's visit.

Yesterday my Uncle Bob visited me at college (he was in the area selling medical instruments/supplies). It was very nice to have someone from home here. I met him in the parking lot at 1700, gave him a very brief tour of campus, and showed him my room (which was somewhat disorderly, because I wasn't expecting to have him there), and we drove to Ojai Pizza. We discussed a nice wide variety of topics, from flooding to my subjects to his kids' baseball leagues and dead Greek men. And had very good pizza.

Don Rags

As I'm sure some of you people know (and as some probably don't) in the middle of every semester at TAC, there is a period of time known as "Don Rags." This refers to the ancient and venerable tradition of having your tutors talk to eachother behind your back to your face.
In other words, every student in the school, at different assigned times, goes into a classroom, where they are faced with a battery of teachers, who proceed to debate the merits and flaws of said student, not addressing the student directly at any time, but referring to him as though he were not present. And they're not always very merciful.
However, in return for 15 minutes of torture, we do get 3 days off of school, which seems like a fair trade to me.
During Dons Rags, I've had a pretty fun time, playing chess, going bowling, playing LOTS of Ultimate Frisbee, having some UT2004 Tournaments, and other such stuff.
My actual DOn Rags went pretty well, almost all my tutors had good things to say about me, and Math and Lab tutors didn't have anything negative to say, although that was balanced out by my seminar tutor, who didn't seem to have anything positive to say.

In other recent news, Mr Dragoo brought up Yoda in his other language class, and told them, "Fecundum est studium Jedorum." (fruitful is the study of the Jedi).

Mike Crump and Gabe Mamola protested outside of eachother's Don Rags, because they were both in room 209 (one of the only rooms with big windows) and they held a sign saying "Have Mercy." Only Mr. Nieto noticed it when Crump heldit, but because Gabe waved it and jumped around while Crump was having his Don Rags, all the tutors noticed and commented on it, and Mr. Nieto ran out and chased him off.

Erin said to, so I will

Here are the rules
1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it. Just grab what is closest!

Euclid's Elements, Page 123, sentences 5-8

Let AB be the given finite straight line; thus it is required to cut AB in mean and extreme ratio. On AB let the square BC be described; and let there be applied to AC the parallelogram CD equal to BC and exceeding by the figure AD similar to BC. Now BC is a square; therefore AD is also a square.

What fun. I liked book 4.

Girls... *rolls eyes*

Today I gave a large lily to Kitty and was promtly bonked on the head with it.